Some other anon elsewhere on /trv/ was saying Bratislava was like the US in the 2000s.

Well, what are some other examples?

- Tajikistan is like pre-revolution Iran / Persia in that being part of the USSR helped shield it from the religious revolutions and theocracy that have plagued main Iran; its language is very close to Persian / Farsi.
- Taiwan is sort of like "China if the Communists lost", but sort of isn't since it feels refreshing and modern rather than some old relic.
- Japan is obviously not China, and you'd have to be pretty retarded to mistake one for the other for over a day... but people say they've preserved a lot of Tang dynasty-style architecture in their temples, etc. Even their language, while not a direct sibling to Chinese, preserves many etymologically Chinese phrases whose Chinese cognates would sound archaic.
- Poland and Hungary echo Germany before it went woke, and have more, er, homogenous populations (though not entirely 100%).
- Finland and the Baltics are great places to see Russian-styled architecture if travel to Russia or (((Ukraine))) is presently unfeasible.
- Croatia is like the coastal parts of Italy before bad tourists started ruining it.
- Montenegro, Bosnia, and Albania (pictured) are like the coastal parts of Croatia before bad tourists started ruining it (the latter two are Muslim-majority countries, but apparently they're more based than western Euro countries currently being overrun with muzzies like France and Germany?).
- Miami is sort of like pre-revolution Cuba and has a large exiled Cuban population, though it's still obviously in America (but nevertheless, large parts of the city are Spanish-monolingual).
- This is sort of cheating since it's in the same country, but parts of the Great Plains and Mountain West (e.g. ID and SD) are said to resemble the 90s-2000s US in culture and lifestyle.
- Argentina and Chile are apparently great places to be if you're a white supremacist - think a European country but colder.

Serbia sort of felt like how I imagine early 2000s Russia

>- Argentina and Chile are apparently great places to be if you're a white supremacist - think a European country but colder.
I saw basically zero white people in Chile
I went to the town Hitler supposedly moved to in Argentina but can't say I noticed any nazism

>>2794842 (OP)
It’s not as clear anymore, and it was always a little inaccurate because of the French and international communist influences, but the old chestnut that “Laos is like Thailand X years ago” still has elements of truth. It resembles (and especially used to resemble) upcountry Thailand at an earlier stage of its development. I’d say it’s somewhere in the “Thailand 20-25 years ago” neighborhood now from some angles, but it’s changing fast.

I’m really old, and first visited Laos in 1995, when I was living in NE Thailand. My Isaan friends called it “Thailand 50 years ago” back then. It was a much more closed country—there were no visas on arrival, and the only English guidebook for the place (a skinny little Lonely Planet written by Joe Cummings, who was also their sole Thailand guidebook author back then) still had warnings in it that people who looked like hippies could be refused entry, roads between Vientiane and Luang Prabang posed risks of guerilla or bandit attacks, and the national airline’s fleet of clunky second-hand Soviet-built prop planes did not meet international safety standards. Vientiane was something like a sixth of its current population, and the streets were practically empty of cars; there weren’t even many scooters, just a lot of bikes. And obviously most women wore traditional skirts, a lot of men wore commie-style jumpsuit-looking uniforms. There were no ATMs or traffic lights. The restaurants still had Russian menus painted on the walls.

Pretty much all gone forever now, apart from the women’s skirts. But the country still resembles a poorer, smaller Thailand in some ways.

Myanmar is what Thailand was 20-30 years ago.

>>2794858
Wonder if places like Armenia, Georgia, or Kazakhstan would feel similarly

>>2794892
Laos now has a direct bullet train connection to China so I wonder if that's going to swing things in any direction. Besides isn't it like both Thailand and Vietnam? They still have lots of leftover landmines I think.

>>2794955
Aren't they currently under a civil war and are ranked "Level 4: Do Not Travel"?

>>2794981
>Besides isn't it like both Thailand and Vietnam?
Yeah, thanks to both French colonialism and communism, it’s got some similarities with Vietnam, too. But culturally it’s a lot more like Thailand—closely related languages, same school of Buddhism, etc.

They still have lots of leftover landmines I think.

>>2795027
Oh, whoops—yeah, Laos hasn’t got landmines (that’s more of a Cambodian problem, now mostly but still not completely fixed), but they’ve still got a lot of UXO (unexploded ordnance), leftover bomblets from the skajillions of cluster bombs that were illegally dropped all over the fucking place in the 70s—it was the most bombed ground in the world by some metric or other (probably most tonnage per sqm or something).

>>2794842 (OP)
>- Finland and the Baltics are great places to see Russian-styled architecture if travel to Russia or (((Ukraine))) is presently unfeasible.
Finland looks absolutely nothing like Russia.
>- Croatia is like the coastal parts of Italy before bad tourists started ruining it.
Most of Italy's coast is cheaper and less tourist-ridden than Croatia's these days.
>Albania (pictured)
I think that's Saranda and it's a concrete hellhole. Looks ugly as all fuck IRL, completely devoid of sovl.

>>2794842 (OP)
Lviv = Krakow before EU.

Istanbul is like Rome before the G*rmans ruined it.

>>2794842 (OP)
Less of a travel pov but more of a living pov: Oklahoma ≈ Texas before commiefornians ruined it